Polling

In 2014, our social lives can be wildly complicated, especially with all the different choices users have from phones to clothes to politics. What better way to measure people's interests than with a poll?

Straw (pollwithstraw.com) is a new service that lets you create and share polls with text or pictures right to your Facebook, via SMS, Twitter, and more. The service is super simple with just you creating the choices, adding any optional photos, and checking off which social networks to publish.

We're still early on in the US election and while some in our audience are very enthralled with the politics we're geeking out over the technology. Tonight is Microsoft's first real widespread use of their new SmartGlass technology--the augmentation of their Xbox 360 media offerings via smartphone and tablets. In fact, SmartGlass just launched on iOS this very evening to coincide with the election coverage (provided by NBC).

We decided to give it a little video coverage ourselves, showing the service in action. The SmartGlass app allows you to participate in the live polling questions, get up to the minute electoral map coverage, details on various aspects of national and state elections and more. Overall, it's quite a fun experience and we're looking forward to more of these interactive and expanded events on the Xbox 360.

Kudos to Microsoft to really bringing something unique to our living rooms.